Tuesday, February 7, 2017

Andrew Carnegie was a ruthless and heartless industrialist
who used murder and brutality as well as corruption to become one of the
richest men in the world. However, put aside the idea that morality has any
intrinsic value and it’s easy to see how this man could be considered one of the
most successful ever. He used the systems that were in place, systems that
operated banking, work place rules, the ease of buying politicians, the how the
public perceived men with money, and he used these systems perfectly. Those
systems are still in place and they are still being used for the very same
reasons for the very same ends today. Nothing has changed.

In the later years of his life, Carnegie gave away a great
deal of his wealth and established libraries and all sorts of trust funds to
help educate people, even though the lives and blood of his workers were the lubricant
that make the flow of this money possible, but again, all of this was done
within a previously built system that was already running before Carnegie
arrived on the scene.

We have to understand that money is a system of beliefs held
by all people who use it. We believe that money will work, that we can trade
pieces of paper for goods and service, illegal drugs and illicit sex, and the
transaction will be honored by all parties. Moreover, and here’s the tricky
part, we’ve devised another system that requires nothing but electronic
transfers of information to be included in this so that with nothing at all
more than a sixteen digit number and an expiration date, we can buy anything we
want and never so much as leave our sofas.

The real problem in these systems that we have created is
that they were created, ostensibly as systems that would serve the community of
humankind. However, once they became so large they became unstoppable and there
also became subject to gaming. One person, or a group of people, could use that
system to exploit other people and the people with the most toys would win. But
the system itself serves no one as it is amoral and uncaring, blind and deaf.
It’s like a river running through a town; how it is used doesn’t matter to the
river only to those who use it.

Now, if we can see, feel, and experience the problems with
these systems as we did in the 1930’s during the Great Depression and the late
00’s with the Great Recession, we might consider how a few people, or a few
companies, might use these systems to control and exploit the vast majority of common
people but we had no idea what to do about it at all and we still don’t. It’s there and we know it’s harmful to us but
there’s no real and practical solution anyone can come up with to help and we
all understand it might be too late.

Then, suddenly, it gets very weird.

What we have not planned on happening and we cannot control
once it does, is the fact that one day computers are going to become systems
that behave in a manner that is consistent with their own understanding of the
existing systems. We see this already in computer programs that chose stocks to
buy and sell, buy tickets for concerts online to sell later for great profit,
and even computer programs that rent apartments to sublet later at great
profit, but the code inside of the computer is the same code inside the
monetary system; greed is good. More is better. The whole thing is beginning to
give birth to machine who are coded to create an infinite amount of wealth with
no considerations outside that thought. If artificial intelligence is a profit
drive and profit based system then we can expect that this system will serve us
as poorly as but with more efficiency than the last.

What I think is lost on most people is that they trust money
so they trust the people who have the most, even to the detriment of their own
families. This is much like trusting the people with the most food, who have
hoarded and cheated others out of good, during a famine. The big difference in
what is coming is there’s ways and means to deal with other people but the
systems that are in place and those that are going to be in place sooner than
later, aren’t human and the resources they hoard and cheat from us aren’t exactly
accessible no matter what we do. If a computer decides to drain every private
bank account in America tomorrow, and hides the money in a billion different
computers all over the world, what exactly is it that can or will be done?

And it might get even worse.

We know that artificial intelligence is being coded for
greed but what if these systems begin to become self-aware and decide that,
like Andrew Carnegie that the systems that are in place can be gamed and those
gaming the systems know best? What will the system see or know or want or like
or be programmed to do and how can we how to do anything but serve it, as we
have in the past?

We can scoff and declare such thoughts as science fiction
but it’s already happening. We are already held hostage when someone hacks our
accounts. We are already helpless when computers go down. We already know that
all our machines can be controlled by third parties if they have the right
codes. This is happening right now. This is going on today.

The idea that we are creating systems that cannot and will
not leave our control is as big a fallacy now as it was one hundred years ago
but now those systems are larger and they move a lot faster. They are being
gamed not by human beings with ideas of being the richest man in the world but
by systems within the systems, and we have no idea if those systems are being
controlled by people or if those people are being controlled by the systems. We
have no way of knowing.

The idea that we might already be influenced by an odd sense
of computer philology that isn’t quite conscience yet still is pushing us towards
one thing or another has never really been spoken aloud. Yet we serve computers
in a manner we would not any other machine. We allow them their flaws and
faults and as much as we complain, each and every day we buy deeper into their control
of the systems we’ve already bought into.

And when the day comes, and it may already have arrived, can
we hope for more compassion from them than we received from Andrew Carnegie?

Wednesday, February 1, 2017

There’s
something brewing deep within my mind, swirling around like blood in a coffee
mug to be thrown onto a canvas, creating a very personal piece of artwork. If
you find this analogy troubling then you either don’t understand art or you
don’t understand the process from which it comes, or maybe even both. Or I
don’t. But it’s there, right where it always is before it appears, like some
noise in the brush before you see what has made it, even if it’s nothing there
at all. There is a lot to be said for there to be nothing that made the brush
move, I like those kinds of ideas, where the absences accentuate the fear, the
longing, the dread, and it doesn’t matter if the audience ever sees what is
pursuing the victim at all, just as long as they feel it.

But who is
to say that the pursued is a victim at all? This thing in my head has stalked
me now for the last three or four days, and I have stalked it. I can’t push it
away and I cannot contain it. It’s like there is someone, or something, blowing
a mist or a fog towards me and if I turn too suddenly the motion of my body, or
that of my mind, dissipates it and scatters it. It has to be lured in and
seduced. It has to be fed at a distance before it will come in and be fed upon
and devoured.

It’s the
classic tale of the mighty hunter, one shot left in his rifle, the wounded
predator still stalking him, and the claws and teeth block him from returning
to camp, and night is falling. What tools does he possess to survive the night?
Should he rush the creature and hope to finish it off? Yet what if we spin this
classic tale and have the creature speak to the man, and ask him what are they
both doing in this fight to the death? What does it serve either to die or be
killed or to kill? Or has it become a contest of wills, where each would rather
die than retreat? Could the story be told from each beings’ point of view with
each heart and mind laid bare for the reader?

This sort of
thinking lures the thought closer to me. It wants to tell me that I am on the
right track, perhaps, or it wants to laugh at my efforts, one of the two, or
maybe both. It’s a thin thing, bare of muscle and sinew, nothing but the
outline of a thought, a shadow of a blade of grass in a thousand acre field,
casting its darkness within darkness, raising its head within a multitude, and
I’m there, walking in the field, not looking for a four leafed clover, but
something that looks like everything else, yet is not.

Maybe that’s
it, I think, and it feels close. Maybe there’s something stalking the man that
can only be seen when it’s at a distance and up close it’s invisible, but at
the same time it can only be heard within breath smelling distance for it whispers.
Or perhaps at night it’s transparent as the wind and speaks softly, as it is
ethereal but in the light of day it is scales and claws and hot venom. It comes
closer to me as these thought intrigue it into being bolder.

Or perhaps
the story needs a twist; the animal in the day is his lover, turned into a wild
beast by an angry wizard. She stalks him and seeks to kill him by day but by
night her spirit seeks comfort with him. She is ethereal by night and a monster
by day, and he cannot bear to kill her and he knows that he cannot let her
live. Yet he cannot seek out other humans for the monster will kill them, or
they might kill it, and she would die also. But she will kill him if he cannot
elude her while trying not to lose her.

The idea
comes closer and closer. It enjoys this and it thinks some of this might
actually work. Maybe.

The wheels
turn and the cogs mesh and there is some debate as to what point in time this
would be most appropriate in. Of course, a medieval knight and a damsel in distress,
but what about moving it forward in time but how much forward, and finally, how
would this story work if set in 2017? Technology’s rise into the personal life
of human beings has to be connected and integrated into each and every story
now, and considerations must be given to devices as well as characters. It may
finally get to the point some story like this is written where the two star
crossed lovers can only communicate through Face Book but it will not be this
story. But I could easily see a cell phone being the only place they could
meet, Face Time with a spirit trapped in the body of a beast, no, nevermind, I
am sorry I brought it up.

But perhaps
this works better if the man is turned into a monster and the woman must pursue
him as he is trying to destroy her. That’s a better analogy if nothing else,
but it does make for a more interesting story when the lead is female. So what
if she hires someone to track the beast, who has a certain amount of humanity
for brief periods, and he flees as far as he can during these times, and while
they are tracking this animal the tracker she has hired falls in love with her.
A love triangle never fails when the reader gets to know all three of the
parties, yes.

The idea
comes to settle down in front of the keyboard and wants to know more like a cat
seeking some inconvenient place of rest. This is an idea whose time has come
and I must begin soon if to avoid it flitting off again.

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About Me

The Non Disclaimer

My writing reflects the things I see, think, and experience, and those things in my past that have led me to be me. It is not always pretty, it is not always funny, and no one has ever made mention of my life as a Disney Movie. If sex, drugs, profanity, or a general irreverence for all things religious somehow offends you, well, there are other blogs which will satisfy your need for self assurance.